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Source: Icky S – Reel Archive Recording – Reel 0805-nonum1 (1961) – 1961-02-21.mp3 File: icky-s-reel-archive-recording-reel-0805-nonum1-1961-1961-02-21.mp3 Duration: 00:33:04
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Well, let's get this thing going again. You know, the icing on the cake of Alcoholics Anonymous, to me, is meetings such as this, and I just get such a bang out of them. That's why you find me at so many. Plus the fact that you meet so many nice people and get a chance to visit with them. I'm not going to tell you any stories about this dynamite boy that's coming up next. I've heard some wild tales about him, getting the wrong bridge, one thing or another. But I do know I met Icky back in New York when I was a delegate back there. He spent an awful lot of time back there. If they'd listened to him, we'd have this thing rolling in a little bit better shape than it's going. He's done a lot of work all the way around, and I'm not going to build him up. You listen to him. I'll give you Icky. Thank you ever so much, John. I'm sure that you folks don't realize it, but this has been one of the most wonderful experiences in all of our AA life. And when Leobel told you yesterday that he appreciated being invited, why, I appreciated it doubly. Because I think quite so often in AA, why, the drunk sobers up and he does more or less forget the one that has made the home possible for him to come back to and kept a few remnants together, and it made both of us feel very, very good to be asked to be on this wonderful program.
And I'd just like to thank again the wonderful way that all of the members of the committee have been so nice to us. And Ebby told me a story about his room that I was really impressed about this hotel. I've been to lots of these conferences, but I never have seen the real welcome that they gave. Ebby sat there in his room while there's a book in there, and it had on there Gideon's. And he thought he recognized it, but he didn't know for sure.
And it had on there from this committee here at Great Ben, it said, uh, if you're lonesome, read so-and-so. So he turned over and started to read these passages in there in regard to loneliness. And at the bottom there was a PS from the local committee. This PS says, if you're still lonesome, call room 626 and ask for, uh, ask for Agnes was her name, wasn't it? So now you know that's real, that's real. Now I tell you, there's very few committees that go to all that trouble, too, you know. So it, I'm sure if Leelaville wasn't here, they'd have extended me the same courtesy. But we do, do appreciate being asked here, and John didn't tell you, but I'm just a drunkard. And I haven't had a drink of any kind of alcoholic beverage or goofballs of any kind in 22 days and one month and 14 years at 430 this afternoon. But I would like to thank you ever so much for asking us here, and I hope that my mentioning the length of sobriety didn't bother anybody, because you know, old drunks never die, they just smell that way, and it's nothing to be concerned about. But I do feel very highly honored. And still, every time I get up to try to talk, I don't know why it is, but I just start shaking on the inside like two men shaking hands. I don't know what it is. And so I'd like to try to briefly talk about two little things today. First, I'd like to talk about you and me and Alcoholics Anonymous, and then I'd like to talk about my favorite subject, me and AA. That's the one that
[00:05:00]
I really love. Some five years ago, in 1954, in September, Texas was asked to send a trustee to the Board of Alcoholics Anonymous. I became your trustee for four years time, and I had a rich experience. I met four times a year with the Board of Trustees in New York and talked about your and my Alcoholics Anonymous business. And if we can ever understand that that is the only business that AA has, besides the drunk business, why, AA would do just exactly what we start out to do, and that is to help the man with a drinking problem, not an alcoholic. The man with a drinking problem is the purpose of AA. We don't care whether the man is an alcoholic or what kind of SOB he is. You know, lots of people don't like, lots of people don't like this word alcoholic. I hate the damn word. Nobody knows what the thing is. You go to one doctor and you're mentally crazy, and another one you're this and another one you're that, and I know they are. But boy, I know that I'm a drunk, and that's why I love AA. It says we have a solution to your drinking problem. I love that word solution. It's something liquid. It flows, and that attracted my attention. So, personally, now that, as my good friend Claude said, you're not a trustee anymore, you have been fully pardoned, why, I'm perfectly at liberty to tell how I feel personally. I think one of the greatest fundamental principles in the program of AA today is the representation that you have on the Board of Trustees. I do not think that AA has become of age.
There is three or four people that have been sober 21 years, if that's what's become of age. But I've seen enough of these drunks at these meetings when somebody says, we want to move the telephone in the club room from here to there. Boy, if we are of age, God knows what we're going to do when we get to be 50 or 60 years old. And who goes with who and who sleeps with who. Now, I'm telling you, that just tears one of these groups just all to pieces, you know, and it's none of our damn business. And to me, it just sums down to what a man wrote years and years ago, a man by the name of Emerson, and I have changed this one word. To me, AA in the practice is not form. It is a life. It is the order and soundness of a man or woman. It's not something else to be got, to be added, but it is a new life of those faculties you have. It is to do right. It is to love. It is to serve. It is to think. It is to be humble. You are alcoholic synonyms.
And I'd like to talk for a few minutes here about a problem that I have. You see, my biggest problem in my life is my drinking, and that person is me, and I know now that I will always have that problem. I have seen too many men and women come into AA and stay sober and forget that they had a drinking problem. And God willing and with your help, I hope that I never allow myself to forget that I have a drinking problem. And that problem is spelled with a capital P in my life, and that letter P is the 16th letter in the alphabet. And I want to explain to you what that letter P in my life has really meant over a long period of time in regard to this problem, this drinking problem. First, I was phony as an $8 bill. Why it is after I have one drink of whiskey that I would
[00:10:08]
rather climb up in a tree and tell you a lie than just stand flat-footed on earth here and tell you the honest to goodness truth I don't know. You give me one drink of that juice and the truth's not in me. I become every and everything just as phony as I can be. I automatically become full of self-pity. Another P. I know that all that was was a bondage of self that I lived within. Now, I can't very well explain to you, but Leelabelle was the cause of my drinking. She didn't understand me. Man, a lie the trouble was, she understood me too damn well if you know what I'm talking about. You let me be drunk for three or four weeks or something like that, and you talk about full of self-pity. Everything in the world has happened to me. Nobody understands me. And I was a playboy. Now, if you don't know what a playboy is, that's a tramp worth money. And when you give me one or two drinks, how wealthy I do get. Oh, man. Particularly other people's money when I can write those checks. And I played all over the country, much to my sorrow. And I didn't know that when I was playing that that letter P was really playing an important part in my life, because I had become poisoned with whiskey and egotism. All the whiskey that I ever drank in my life is made out of one word, and that's ego. The rest of that stuff is just an ingredient that's in it. And I have yet to find an alcoholic that wasn't an egotistic maniac from the word go. At least I know when I look in that mirror, that's me. And as I drank, my promise became nothing. And I never got so tired of anything in my life of being sorry. And sure enough, I was. Get a job, get drunk, go back to man to get your last check, and you tell him, I'm sorry. Sorry you was late. Sorry you didn't get there. I got so tired of having nervous breakdowns, chills. I tell you something that I ate disagreed with me constantly. I was really sorry. And I would promise you anything. And with those false promises that I made, not only to you and to myself, I've become very proud. And I had a great deal of false pride. And that pride was just a pain in you know where. But the drunk has it. At least I did.
I didn't know it at the time. I was physically sick. It took me a long time to find out how really sick that I was. I'd been sober five years, was feeling bad, and I hadn't had a real physical examination for many years. We went over to Scott and White in Temple, went through the clinic, and they found out that I had somewhere around about 25 to 35 percent of my liver left, and that was all. And you know those doctors had one hell of a time finding it out.
About the third day they went in there and they finally got me in there and they said, have you ever had yellow fever? And I said, no. Said, have you ever had yellow jaundice? I said, no. Said, have you ever taken yellow fever shots? And I told them that I was overseas in the Middle East for three and a half years drunk, and every time I bent over while they gave me a yellow fever shot, they said, well, maybe that caused it. We'll see.
Another series of tests. Nothing showed up. Finally this doctor said, we know positive. This doctor said, uh, we know positive that there's no trace of alcohol in your system anywhere.
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Said, we know you're not a heavy drinker. I said, that's good. Said, did you ever drink alcoholic, alcohol beverage excessively? I said, well, I stayed drunk for 17 years. He said, why in the hell didn't you tell me? I said, that's your business, not mine. And automatically I got scared to death, man. I thought I was going to die immediately. That self-pity set in, you know, and I thought, here I am right in the prime of life.
Find out I haven't got any liver. And I said, when am I going to die? He said, you're not. He said, I don't know why the Lord likes you drunks. He said, it just takes 10 or 15 percent. But he said, I would recommend that you don't drink anymore. Physically sick. Most alcoholics have abused their body so that they're bound to be physically sick. Just for another illustration, I knew that I was. The first time Marty Mann came to Dallas was in 1946 in January, and I sobered up in December of 45.
She made this wonderful talk, and it's the first time I ever heard anybody say that alcoholism was a physical allergy coupled with a mental compulsion. And I hadn't been sober but a few days. And I thought that Marty said, mental concussion. And I went around feeling the back of this old noggin, you know. And I knew them damn policemen had been beating on me with them nightsticks, you know. And I thought, you reckon I got one of them too.
So I found out that I was sick and that I had a very bad disease. But that wasn't a disease that was giving me trouble. The disease that gave me trouble is the disease of puffed up. Boy, when I get full of that stuff, well, I get puffed up more ways than one. Of course, your feet swell where you can't get your shoes on. But what it does to you otherwise is unbelievable. We become things that we don't know anything else about.
And this radio and television thing is way, way out of time for the alcoholic. He heard radio and saw television programs 1,800 years ago. Man, this ain't nothing new to the drunk. All this new do-it-yourself stuff that they're doing now, the drunk's been trying that ever since he was born. I'm going to get sober my way. Puffed up. And I don't know what in the world outside of AA can do to let that hot air out of us.
But boy, we really are puffed up. And then another P that gave me a great deal of trouble in my drinking problem was the word policeman. Now, I hope that none of those people ever caused you all the trouble that they caused me. As I was telling somebody the other evening here, I don't know why, but I know the family relatives of all these policemen. I know particularly these great big Irishman's father and mother, see.
And when I've just had two bottles of beer standing on the corner, minding my own business, and they come up to me and start asking me all these damn fool questions, which I cannot answer, immediately in this conversation it gets around to my telling them who their mother and father was. And boy, they don't like that when they find out that there's been a little discrepancy in their family relationship.
And invariably, they take me off to that jail. I'm going to meet a policeman that I know is not one of those kind of people sometime, but so far up to the present time, I've yet to find one of them. And I'm reminded of being in jail in Texarkana, and if it wasn't old Judge Niles, a good friend of mine, I wouldn't use his name. But I'd got picked up over there for drinking while intoxicated, and thrown in this jail, and oh, I was sick.
Man, I tell you, I was really sick. And another wino in there comes to me, and he says, Slim, he says, if you can get a dime, I can get us a drink. And I thought, boy, now what kind of drinking whiskey is a dime in jail going to get a man? And I said, get away, boy. I said, go ahead. I said, man, I feel bad already. We can't get no drink for a dime. He says, if you can't get a dime, can you get a loaf of light bread?
And boy, I knew it blew his staff. I wasn't hungry anyway. But I sure didn't want a drink.
[00:20:00]
So I said, well, we can talk this old night jailer out of anything. So he come by that night, and we told him how hungry we were, and sure enough, we hadn't eaten. And he said, well, yeah, I got an old stale loaf of light bread. And so he brought it in there, and when the rest of these drunks went to sleep, they were painting the city hall and jail at Texarkana. And over in this corner was a 55-gallon drum of shellac.
And boy, that is when the greatest chemical experiment ever was performed in the United States, as far as I'm concerned. This dumb wino showed me how to make whiskey. Good whiskey, too. We filled a little hole in the bottom of this loaf of light bread, another little larger, and thanks to the city, they give you a tin cup, you know, when you're in one of those things. Well, when the rest of these drunks went to sleep, we went over there, and we filtered this shellac through this loaf of light bread, and boy, we cut that pure green alcohol down to the bottom in our little cups.
The third day that I come up before Judge McGuire drunk, he says, we don't know where you all are getting that whiskey, but he says, I'm telling you one thing. He says, we're going to give you one hour to get out of Texarkana, and if you ever come back, he says, I'll give you 10 years. Now, when you get thrown out of jail, you're in bad shape. And we'll have lots of fun. You know, I got a job. We're going to start in Texarkana for the General Telephone Company on the Arkansas side this time, not on the Texas side.
We're going over there Tuesday to start a job for the telephone company, and I'll go to the meetings, and I always go by and see old Judge McGuire, and he gets the biggest kick out of our drinking that shellac there in his jail. But you know, these policemen weren't any trouble at all. Another word that started with a P is the word partner, and boy, that thing gave me more trouble than anything. I couldn't be a partner in business.
I reached the point in my drinking that I couldn't make agreement with another person and keep it due to this increased obsession to drink, and what I told you didn't mean a thing, because I was just wondering in the back of my mind, when can I get another drink? At the same time, and a lot's worse, but I didn't know it, I was no longer a partner in a marriage contract with my wife. I wasn't fulfilling my part of the bargain at all.
As a partner, I was nothing, and about that time I even got to where that I wasn't even a partner in drinking. I reached the point that I never knew what one drink would do to me at any given time. One time, I could drink a half a pint, be all right. Next time, one or two drinks, gone for days, not even know. And I got to where that drinking was throwing me down, and I hope I never forget so smug and complacent in this wonderful program in prison.
Start thinking about this new suit I got on. Did I ever forget? Waking up at 4 30 in the morning, dying for a drink, and just got about that much left, and scared to death it isn't going to stay down. Those old cold sweats, shakes, finally get that first one to stay down. I hope I never forget that. You lose it and you're afraid you're going to die, and you're too sick to die. I'm different from most drunks.
I wouldn't have committed suicide for nobody. Man, I was too scared. Hell, what I'd been doing, man. Whoo, man, they talk about committing suicide. That's a fatherless thing from my mind. I'd already been in hell too long. I didn't want to get in there no deeper, man. I knew that for sure. So I just ended up on those peas. I was a perfect person for the penitentiary, poorhouse, or potterfield. No physician, no psychologist, pastor, or person could keep me from being a puking, stinking drunk.
And I couldn't stop drinking with the knowledge of self. Now, I tried everything in the world, and right on top of that,
[00:25:00]
the word pea kept me drunk because I happened to be a powder man. And unbeknown to you, a dynamite man can get a job drunk or sober. It don't make any difference. You just blow yourself up. That's all. Dynamite men always work by themselves. Very few people are ever around them. You can't get any insurance. And I learned how to handle every known type of problem. Every known type of explosive, except that dear little half-pint bottle.
And that thing will blow you or me higher than all the rest of the dynamite, all the rest of the atomic bombs that man knows about. That little half a pint is your and my demolition kit. Because I know I stayed drunk in the army at your expense overseas for three and a half years. The time of my life went all the way around the world at your expense. Very seldom ever sober. The odd part about the whole thing was that 12 of us went overseas together in this demolition team.
We ended up over in the Middle East to teach our good friends the Russians how to use our explosives. How in the hell they got so far ahead of us, I don't know. We must have been better teachers than we thought, because the only thing the world had when we were there were black powder. They didn't know what a cake of TNT looked like until we showed them. They had no dynamite whatsoever, all black powder, slow-burning fuse.
Out of these 12 men that was in this squad that went overseas together, we were stationed at different places all over the Middle East in the African campaign. One and a half of us come back. The rest of them are still over there. One man blows just half of him away, and he's on a scooter. Now, a thing in the world happened to me except I lost my teeth, my glasses, and come back weighing about 119 pounds, dripping wet.
And I was not an atheist or an agnostic because I didn't know how to spell it. I ain't got sense enough to be one of those kind of things. And every time that discussion comes up about it, you know, why, invariably, when you're talking to one of them, while you talk to him long enough, he says, God only knows. And I begin to wonder, well, what's going on here? I thought he told me that he was an agnostic.
And you asked him, and you get him in a corner, and he'll tell you every time, God only knows. Well, I sure didn't know. And why in the world I could come back from those experiences and come back here and got into AA on December the 30th of 1945 and had trouble with a higher power. The word P has been in my life. So that P has really been wonderful to me because I came to AA with a drinking problem.
And I found a power greater than myself that restored me to sanity. Power. And you know, that's all that dynamite is, is power. It comes from the word power. We blow up, but the same power brings us back. The same power, as a man said this morning, breathe life into me. What it is, no one knows. What it is, no one knows, but it's there. So the first what you taught me was patience, which I have very little of.
But I do at least have patience towards all men, thanks to you. The word pardon has meant a great deal to me because I found out that this higher power is the only thing that will abundantly pardon all of us. A man will pardon you part way, but tongue in cheek, but not God. He will forgive you if you can forgive yourself, I believe. And the word pardoner will become a blessing. And for the last 14 years, Leobel and I have been pardoners.
And by the grace of God and with your help in this AA program, we're now friends. And I thank you for your time. And the greatest relationship I think that can exist between man and woman is to be married
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and be friends. And through this program, and your help, we have truly become partners without the use of alcohol. And we have found peace. We have found peace within. And I don't know who this man Deuteronomy was. Or maybe he wasn't a man. I don't know. Anyway, they got a book written by that name. It was written 1800 B.C. He knew more about you and me than we know about ourselves. That old boy in there describes just exactly the way I was. He says the man that lives the life of drunkenness and riotous living will wish to see that day was night and night was day. And boy, the drunks are not children of the night. Nobody ever was. Many, many times I woke up, wished that it was daylight. And just as sure as it got daylight, boy, I wished it was night. Let's just let that sun go down and let me hide. And they knew that about us that long ago. And I'd like to thank all the drunks in this world that have helped us. But the man that I would really like to thank is the man that I now call God. Maybe some of you folks have the same trouble with that mystery as I do. And another drunk told me, and I'd like to pass it on to you. He said if you have trouble with the word God, add one more letter O. And it spells the word good. And everything in this world that is good is God's. And God won't have anything to do with anything unless it's good. And I thank God for A.A. because I believe that it's good.
And this is the way me and the War Department, the Mother Superior here, feel about it. And this is the way y'all taught us. Every time now when we break bread or sit down and eat, we're like a bunch of kids anyway. I hope we stay that way. This is what y'all taught us to say. We thank thee now, dear Lord, for home and friends and food. And may we live this day to show our gratitude. Thank you.